Winbench 3D Audio

Notes

We decided to throw the SQ2500 up against an SBLive! Value, a Vortex2 SuperQuad reference board, and a TerraTec DMX to let you see how the card stacks up against the other top sound cards available. We used a Celeron 400 in an attempt to bring out larger CPU utilization numbers.

As you can see, the SQ2500 and our reference Aureal SuperQuad digital card posted virtually identical scores in the Winbench 3D DirectSound CPU utilization tests. That's not surprising because the new Vortex2 optimizations are in the A3D portion of the chip. The TerraTec scores are pretty dissapointing, but we'll attribute those to poor drivers right now. The original Vortex2 drivers didn't perform very well either...